Louna - my post was to show that FDCL is by no means bad talent and that Disc priest has so many opportunities to smite, that he will always get plenty of procs. (which is opposite to what founder of the thread thinks and to what many ppl were mindlessly repeating)

I never said it was a bad talent.It's good only when you would spend 70%of the fight smiting.
Which i see myself smiting that much on 3fights.

Small amount of plus mindbender damage bonus (compared not to 0 but to shadowfiend damage ofc), additional utility of fdcl for e.g.fasthealing first of 2 DPS in spirit phase. + We run with 2 discs shammy, 1 disc being "damage one" with mindbender and max haste, 2nd (me) being the "healing disc" who switches between smites and bigger heals/ss/shields...

You also said that you pair with resto shaman and resto druid.And you changed it to double disc and rdruid for garajal.
I said based on what your set up was that you are the 3rd healer so you would go for pure damage.
And mindbender DOES more dmg than shadowfiend.

As i mentioned, different tactic (our own) - we have all raid out only 2 tanks soaking Quiang. Pretty simple healing by smiting + shielding, you should try before spitting... Therefore absolutely no PoH needed :P
Instant flashes are pure gold there for any mistake, coz any mistake happens on the run. Healing between volley shots, badly kited shadow, you name it. Mindbender has none of this and damage bonus is negligible.

So you have your tanks getting 550k dmg each hit for 2min and 45 sec?(No dmg reduction taken into consideration ofc).Preety pointless if you ask me,it would most likely lead to use expensive single target heals.

1st phase exactly, only when soaking ends by some problem in necessity of healing up stunned soaker, I like having Instant Flashes much better.
Mindbender simply adds too little.

No soaker should have any issue if you shield him before him going out.Shield usually absorbs all the dmg(with him using def cds ofc)and even if it doesn't it usually doesn't bring him below 80%.
As for the rest of the fight i already said enough on my previous post.

Different role - Im the one running far from raid with pheromone kiter. On raid I would go disc too.

We are doing it with 8ppl soaking(since we keep our melee dps 24/7 w/o kiting)
So i am not sure what you are talking about.

Misunderstanding - I smite Amber Shaper /big fire add when he has debuff from monster and monster when it is debuffed 5secs after self-interrupt.
I definitely do not flash heal debuffed raid member to kill him, yes 2 shields solve that pretty well. Stopping smiting when debuffed raid member is <15 yards is needed too, unfortunately. Would be even worse after 5.1. increases range of atonement to 40. Free insta flashes are useful all the time though, there is always someone who was not hit by Poh / hit by smal bubble for too long / hit by thrown tank, ...

I am not sure if you are talking about hc or normal.
Either way,you won't be able to smite to get the instant flash heals when it matters(which is at the last phase the dmg at the last phase is too much to just smiting and best thing to do is ss->poh or poh with spot healing with shields pom and cascade,maybe divine star after the fix as well).

You had issue with mana regen? Maybe on HC, but normal simply lets me smite (atonement) heal through most with exception of dissonance explosions (SS first, shield the other), instant flashes used of that "screaming" comrades + in add phase (we use add kiting there). Rly dont see any reason for mindbender here...

I would be interested on seeing logs from this tbh.
Cause i can't see how you'd be getting the most out of it with just smiting.
Yes i do go oom.At the end of the fight i am oom.
I am @half mana at kiting part but pot and mindbender on that phase bring me up to full.
And i just checked the logs from last week since i was unsure if the going oom@the end of the fight really paid [email protected] was ~107k hps with ~86k hps(e).So i would be really interested if your way works better.
I do see tho on what fights FDCL would be usefull tho.
One of them being 1st boss terrace hc.I am actually using it.1st and 2nd boss preety much make the difference for the talent.
But that fight is not even close to the way others are when aoe healing is required and more efficient than single target(or passive healing from atonement).
Also i left this for the end.

Pretty simple healing by smiting + shielding, you should try before spitting...

I have tried it.The fights where you can extensively smite are mainly the following(and where ofc FDCL is working perfectly)
Those being
Protectors(suppose you are not doing it on elite,during Kaolan and Regail)
Sha of Fear
(probably Lei shi as well but haven't tried doing it so i am leaving it out.)
Ofc you can add these as well.
Spirit kings(subetai only)
Feng(Spear only)
Elegon (stage 1)
Vizier (2nd and 3rd platform)
But you will be casting shields, pom, ss+poh, during the rest of the fight anyway which would normally make you wanna gain as much mana as possible w/o waiting for FDCL procs when they are not needed.
I may be missing some bosses atm but that most likely means that using gheal+shield would prolly be better than smiting and using atonement healing to heal.

Let's talk about professions for a while. I'm leveling my Priest currently and need to decide which ones are the best in endgame as far as performance goes, everything else is secondary. Do note that I've never actually played any Priest in endgame, although I've played a Shaman from TBC. Here's what I've thought:

To me, Engineering seems vastly superior to anything else. It's on-use cooldown aligns perfectly with SS and gives a huge chunk of Int. Granted it puts on-use trinkets on cooldown so they can't be used simultaneously, but at least for this tier it's not a slightest problem. Even in future tiers, on-use throughput trinkets have historically been on 1.5min or higher cooldown if I remember correctly, so Engineering would remain a very good choice unless SS gets changed.

The second profession I'm not that sure of. I've heard people praising Tailoring, but I remain unconvinced. They say when you align Rapture with Tailoring Spirit proc, it gives massive amount of mana. Fair enough, but is this actually possible without losing mana gained by trying to align Rapture with the proc instead of just using PWS so it procs Rapture as often as possible? Also, in later tiers Spirit is likely to become more obsolete, and while Tailoring has Int proc, I personally hate throughput procs as a healer because they're unreliable. Furthermore, either of these enchants take away regular cloak enchant unless I'm mistaken, which is fairly big chunk of Int.

As far as I'm aware, rest of the professions are flat 320 stat increases. Some of them allow Spirit, some don't. Blacksmithing will probably be superior when epic gems become available, like it has been in the past, as well as having access to cheap waist socket. Alchemy is always nice for double duration flasks.

I personally do not like Engineering. Since Disc stat weights are Spirit-Mastery-Int/Crit, the glove enchant is not really worthwhile. I would vote Tailoring, if you can time Darkglow and lets say....Mana Tide totem. You can get 100k+ raptures, its amazing. As for the second, I would pick whichever you liked better.

Hi, thank you for the guide. I just came back after a year layoff, and was wondering if you can help me out in choosing which VP gear I should buy first to help me gear up. I got back 2 weeks ago and currently have 2k VPs. Thanks for the help.

Not really sure if I should post in here or make a new thread but I could use a bit of help. :P

I've had my priest disc/holy since BC, and it was my main in Cataclysm. When MoP hit I had rerolled to mistweaver monk and due to recent changes I've come back to my priest as my main starting last week. I'm healing as disc (because it seems stronger than holy right now and because I like bubbles) but I think I could use some help getting myself used to it again.

My guild is very casual, we raid 6 hours a week and have been banging our heads against Elegon for a good month now. I realize there are some issues with my raid executing the mechanics properly but I'm still wondering if there is something I could do to improve, for this fight in particular.

This week and last week have logs of Elegon attempts on my priest, there are Elegon attempt logs in November as well but they're on my monk (don't know if comparing that would help in any way whatsoever as far as looking at player caliber or playstyle).

I'm really just looking for any help I can get regarding optimal changes to my gemming/reforging/enchanting or playstyle during raids. Thanks!

1. Your Armory looks fine, a few things I would change:I would try to change your shoulders/bracers to at least heroic mode blues. They are usually better than the PvP ones. I noticed on your legs you reforged out or crit into spirit, reforge out of haste -> Spirit. Crit is a lot better than haste, other than that your gems/enchants/reforging are correct.

2. I have a few tips to healing Elegon as disc. If you are 2 healing it (which you should be as 10man), you should make sure that all the people on your side during the add killing phase are all in either group1/group2. This ensures that your prayer of healing/DA will at least proc on as many people as you can. Also, as you should remember in wrath, Rapture can now proc more than once if the bubbles are broken simultaneously. This is REALLY good for elegon. If you can get a couple bubbles on the raid before an annihilation/sparks exploding, your HPS will go up and you will get loads of mana.

Your spirit shell use on Elegon can improve significantly. You should be using it almost on CD, making sure you get a full stack on the whole raid before Annihilation. You can't get spirit shell for every one, but that will provide a huge boost in HPS for you. You can also stack spirit shell during the 2nd phase, when the orbs die they do AoE to the whole raid which you can absorb. And again in the 3rd phase after the pillars have died and adds start coming out, you can stack spirit shell to help keep the raid alive as everyone is moving around.

You should also be using Penance and Holy fire on CD offensively against Elegon. Elegon takes more damage, and everyone has an increased healing buff on them. So you can double dip and get huge atonement heals by doing this.

On this weeks kill of Elegon, Spirit shell and Atonement were my top two heals. Followed by Divine Aegis, Cascade and PoH.

I am still trying to replace the blue pieces I have, particularly the 450 PvP pieces. I suppose I could stand to fit in some more heroics in my playtime.

I did talk to a couple of people who basically told me my raid's troubles with Elegon were mostly due to mechanics and dps issues and not me, but I did just feel like I could improve in certain areas...namely I knew I wasn't grasping the correct spirit shell timing yet or when/where I should be using atonement. Thank for you those tips, they will definitely help.

Had me at the point of dropping shadow offspec and picking up holy. Can someone tell me if there are any fights currently where holy outshines disc?

I would just like to add my experiences as a LFR and heroic dungeon healer (yeah, I know..) with about 475 ilvl.

In LFR, you can do Pen, HF, Smite healing. I take ´out of darkness´ talent which I can then target whomever i want with the flashheals. It works exceedingly well and I am very middle of the pack with healing done. Sadly, I also sometimes beat some DPS.

Heroic dungeons are exceedingly easy to heal through... I see no reason why anyone wouldn´t want to be dpsing and making them faster.

I guess that would be my contribution to helping your guide. Atonement healing is probably nowhere near as good if you are in progression.. but once you outgear content by a little, or have a tank who does, it is very viable and your dps is actually fairly useful.

Right now Disc is sooooo much better than Holy. There are not really any fights where holy is better than disc atm.

This is true with two exceptions I can think of. On Tsulong, holy can be slightly better because of their Guardian Spirit. On Garalon if your strategy has your raid very spread out, holy will likely be slightly better. Realistically though, you should just have your raid change their strat so you can stay disc for garalon.

That being said, disc priest on Tsulong is by no means bad, and disc on garalon is extremely good if your raid is close enough together for PoH.

To Louna - ok, I can see we have a bit different approach to one thing - I e.g.do not use SS on CD for a simple reason - I fight the boss not the other healer(s) in my raid. I can imagine I would be closer to your playstyle If I was not "heal leader" (and had to answer/prove myself to one ). Iinstead I act as "counterweight" almost everywhere - I switch to full heal when necessary and/or needed by situation (e.g. other healers burn their mana bit too fast) but spending most time atonement healing. I know I could top the meter by high margin, but that would be only at the expense of "sniping", not making other healers best abilities shine (druid hots and shammys aoe slow steady healing from totems and rain). I choose therefore not to "SS on CD" when the situation does not demand it. Instead I save the day when 2 healing with shammy on the move where the insta flashes truly make the difference. And believe me - for my style the FDCL is key
+
All I wanted to show by my posts is that author of this sticky is very very wrong not even mentioning FDCL as an option. (instead he may have skipped PW:Solace in my opinion, but here I would not go into any argument, coz I just skipped it myself...). Usuccesfull so far with sticky, hopefully noticed by others who will try and decide on their own.
+
Rly try sometime that 2 tank on Spirit Kings. Youll be surprised how easy whole first phase turns.(ofc when you learned the usual way it seems to you easy too) We did. We love it. No unexpected one-shots when someone is a bit faster and gets hit alone with tank... We end first phase 2 healing it with full mana. Where to lose it when we manage it without using anything else than atonement, FDCL flashes and PW:S for rapture... Rly foolproof (after we get used to it in some 5 tries in progress) + all phases with 2 bosses up are then easier.

I choose therefore not to "SS on CD" when the situation does not demand it.

In most fights you can have SS right before aoe damage.If your raid doesn't need spirit shell before that you may wanna consider going 2healers and assist the healers as shadow with 90tier talents and shield/pom..
On most of the fights you shouldn't go with 3healers anyway,excluding Amber shaper,Garajal,Tsulong and Empress.

Originally Posted by platzman

I would be closer to your playstyle If I was not "heal leader" (and had to answer/prove myself to one )..

I don't really try to prove/answer myself on my heal leader :P
I even proposed him as healing officer.He never tells me what to do or when to do it.
But being "heal leader" as you say so doesn't mean you should get outperformed or not using your class @max potential.

Originally Posted by platzman

All I wanted to show by my posts is that author of this sticky is very very wrong not even mentioning FDCL as an option. (instead he may have skipped PW:Solace in my opinion, but here I would not go into any argument, coz I just skipped it myself...). Usuccesfull so far with sticky, hopefully noticed by others who will try and decide on their own.

How much combat regen you should be aiming for is really dependent on your raid comp. Are you mainly 10/25? And are there any resto shammys in your healing group? In my guild we have a very bad raid healing comp, we are using 2 Disc/2RShammys/2HPallys and for 4/5 heal fights someone goes dps. I NEVER have mana problems because Mana Tide Totems are mega op with rapture. Sometimes 100k+ Rapture Procs. So in my personal example, combat regen does not really matter to much. If you do not have a resto shammy in your group, I would aim to get as much spirit as you can. Even in all heroic raid gear we should still be gemming for spirit. There are some cases where a Int/Spirit, Int/Mastery gem can be used, but Spirit is still going to be the best for us. I hope this helped!

This is probably me being dumb, but what' the deal with Rapture? I'm 89 right now, and I'm guessing PW: S will cost 18-20k at 90. Do I seriously need to wait until I'm very well geared in LFR/normal gear for Rapture to give mana back? It seems kind of ridiculous.